[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.

I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually.

[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.

And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, 'On this date, people will leave the South.' They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.

You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.

Sometimes in some places they would actually stop the train - keep the train from stopping at a particular station because they saw that there were so many black people there waiting to board and so therefore those people wouldn't get to leave.